My life is like the single dewy star
That trembles on the horizon's primrose-bar,--
A microcosm where all things living are.
And if, among the noiseless grasses, Death
Should come behind and take away my breath,
I should not rise as one who sorroweth;
For I should pass, but all the world would be
Full of desire and young delight and glee,
And why should men be sad through loss of me?
The light is flying; in the silver-blue
The young moon shines from her bright window through:
The mowers are all gone, and I go too.
A vein of thought as modern as it is old! More not less depressing,
certainly, to our over-meditative [118], susceptible, nervous,
modern age, than to that antiquity which was indeed the genial youth
of the world, but, sweetly attuned by his skill of touch, it is the
sum of what Mr. Gosse has to tell us of the experience of life. Or
is it, after all, to quote him once more, that beyond those ever-
recurring pagan misgivings, those pale pagan consolations, our
generation feels yet cannot adequately express--
The passion and the stress
Of thoughts too tender and too sad to be
Enshrined in any melody she knows?
29th October 1890
VIII. FERDINAND FABRE
[NORINE]: AN IDYLL OF THE CEVENNES
[121] A FRENCH novelist who, with much of Zola's undoubted power,
writes always in the interest of that high type of Catholicism which
still prevails in the remote provinces of France, of that high type of
morality of which the French clergy have nobly maintained the ideal,
is worth recommending to the more serious class of English readers.
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